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Feb. 28th, 2020 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFoz Meadows' An Accident of Stars truly does feel exactly like an eighties fantasy novel if the eighties in fantasy had been less straight and white, and if it had been around for me to read as a teenager I would have eaten it up with a spoon.
The book is a portal fantasy, in that two of the protagonists are Australian teen Saffron and the Earth-native world-walker Gwen she follows into fantasyland, although the portal stuff doesn't actually have much to do with the plot for most of the book except to provide the opportunity to explain stuff to Saffron and, by proxy, the reader. After an early-book dramatic injury, Saffron accepts with relative equanimity that she's stuck in fantasyland for a few months until a reasonable amount of healing time has passed, so the plot is free to focus on her new pals -- an orphan with magical powers and a mysterious background, and a bratty preteen queen fleeing her evil spouses -- as they deal with classic fantasy issues like The New King Is Bad Actually and Who Will Be Our Allies In The Rebellion, Is It The Mean Matriarchal Priestesses Up North Or What?
The book was a very slow start for me -- in part due to the large amount of infodumping, in part due to some editing issues with my copy that didn't properly separate some dialogue tags and POV breaks and made it difficult to always tell who was thinking or saying what -- but by midway through the fantasy plot had picked up momentum and I really enjoyed a number of the back half developments! But I sort of wish I hadn't gone in thinking 'ah, a portal fantasy!' because it doesn't really function in the ways that most interest me about portal fantasy -- which is to say, I'm interested in portal fantasy because I like culture clash and ironic juxtapositions and meta-narrative. I want to feel like the character who's portaling from our world has a life and background in their own world that means something to them, that informs the way they interact with the fantasy, and that impacts the things that happen there.
In An Accident of Stars, it's important to the narrative that Saffron is Not From Here, but I don't really know anything about her background specifically other than that she has parents and a sister and she goes to high school and she's a Kinsey 4ish. She's a window on the world as much as she is a character -- and that's definitely a common mode for portal fantasy, just not my favorite among them. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about the kind of portal fantasy tropes I do find really interesting, so here is a short list!
- portaler has no destiny but their mundane knowledge and experience comes in unexpectedly useful in fantasyland
- portaler does have a destiny, but their destiny is somehow complicated or subverted
- portaler is genre savvy and it's funny
- multiple people portal (siblings, school friends, school enemies, etc.) and their adventures change their relationships and dynamics
- portal world is weird and metafictional
What about you? Tell me of your favorite portal fantasy tropes!
The book is a portal fantasy, in that two of the protagonists are Australian teen Saffron and the Earth-native world-walker Gwen she follows into fantasyland, although the portal stuff doesn't actually have much to do with the plot for most of the book except to provide the opportunity to explain stuff to Saffron and, by proxy, the reader. After an early-book dramatic injury, Saffron accepts with relative equanimity that she's stuck in fantasyland for a few months until a reasonable amount of healing time has passed, so the plot is free to focus on her new pals -- an orphan with magical powers and a mysterious background, and a bratty preteen queen fleeing her evil spouses -- as they deal with classic fantasy issues like The New King Is Bad Actually and Who Will Be Our Allies In The Rebellion, Is It The Mean Matriarchal Priestesses Up North Or What?
The book was a very slow start for me -- in part due to the large amount of infodumping, in part due to some editing issues with my copy that didn't properly separate some dialogue tags and POV breaks and made it difficult to always tell who was thinking or saying what -- but by midway through the fantasy plot had picked up momentum and I really enjoyed a number of the back half developments! But I sort of wish I hadn't gone in thinking 'ah, a portal fantasy!' because it doesn't really function in the ways that most interest me about portal fantasy -- which is to say, I'm interested in portal fantasy because I like culture clash and ironic juxtapositions and meta-narrative. I want to feel like the character who's portaling from our world has a life and background in their own world that means something to them, that informs the way they interact with the fantasy, and that impacts the things that happen there.
In An Accident of Stars, it's important to the narrative that Saffron is Not From Here, but I don't really know anything about her background specifically other than that she has parents and a sister and she goes to high school and she's a Kinsey 4ish. She's a window on the world as much as she is a character -- and that's definitely a common mode for portal fantasy, just not my favorite among them. On the other hand, it did get me thinking about the kind of portal fantasy tropes I do find really interesting, so here is a short list!
- portaler has no destiny but their mundane knowledge and experience comes in unexpectedly useful in fantasyland
- portaler does have a destiny, but their destiny is somehow complicated or subverted
- portaler is genre savvy and it's funny
- multiple people portal (siblings, school friends, school enemies, etc.) and their adventures change their relationships and dynamics
- portal world is weird and metafictional
What about you? Tell me of your favorite portal fantasy tropes!
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Date: 2020-02-29 03:42 am (UTC)- At what point does a time-travel story become essentially a portal fantasy?
- Do all stories involving fairylands, heavens/hells/underworlds, or realms of the gods that are expected to parallel or overlap reality count as portal fantasies?
- Do stories where readers enter the worlds of books count as portal fantasies? This is a trend that I think has become less common in recent decades but was once very much alive.
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Date: 2020-03-04 04:01 am (UTC)- I think time-travel and portal fantasy are definitely very overlapping genres, but paradox potential and existing historical record add a very different element and feel to time travel stories, while characters in a portal fantasy are much freer to do whatever (although I bet people have written portal fantasies that turned out to be surprise time travel before)
- I also feel like heavens/hells/underworlds/fairy worlds/realms of the gods are different but I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why I feel that ... maybe because the premise of those kinds of books is usually 'the beings who live there know ALL about our world and have been impacting it since the beginning' whereas in a classic portal fantasy everyone's kind of on an equal footing? the portaller doesn't know jack about the world they get to but, likewise, the people in that world don't know anything about ours
- conversely, I do think of 'readers enter the world of a book' as part of the portal fantasy package -- and I'd be really curious to read more about how that trope migrated and mutated over in cdrama and cnovel land where 'reader enters the world of a drama/webnovel/video game' is a really popular trope right now, even though it seems to have fallen out of favor in English-language stuff!
What do you think? I am happy to be argued with on any of this!
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Date: 2020-03-06 06:19 pm (UTC)- I'm not sure I agree with the assumption that all portal fantasy/scifi must have worlds that are ignorant of each other. So much OG portal fiction plays on tropes about prophesy and chosen ones --Narnia, for example-- that requires at least some myth-embedded knowledge about other worlds. And for Euro-style dangerous fairylands, at least, the sense of danger to both worlds from each other, plus the time dilations, makes the stakes feel as high as in an outright portal fantasy, and the mutual effects more difficult than in, say, Doctor Who. Someone sucked beneath a Hill for a night that lasts a hundred years and behaves based on totally different civilizational metrics might feel quite portalled indeed. That said, I think I agree with you on heavens/hells/underworlds - maybe not least because from the POV of the characters or (if based on a real-world theology), those planes of existence are explicitly thought to belong to "our" worlds, just maybe invisibly overlaid onto our daily lives.
- As a child, I loved those kinds of "reader falls into a myth or novel" books (Magic Treehouse!), so I'm glad to hear the genre continues!